How Virginia Rates Among States That Love Books Most

Ranking Virginia Among Most Book-Loving States

Starting from its days as an American colony, Virginia has developed a reputation for being scholarly. One of the nation’s greatest presidents, a native Virginian, is responsible for bequeathing a stunning collection of books to the Library of Congress, and the University of Virginia is consistently rated among the best public universities in the nation.

So with National Read A Book Day happening tomorrow, Sept. 6, we at BetVirginia put a bookmark in our Virginia sportsbooks coverage to analyze which states love books the most.

Here is the list; below it, we’ll explain how we arrived at these numbers.

States That Love Reading Books Most

Rank, State	Library Visits Rank	Kindle Search Rank	Average Pts.
1. Vermont	1	1	1
T2. Wyoming	5	6	5.5
T2. Massachusetts	4	7	5.5
4. Alaska	9	4	6.5
5. Oregon	12	5	8.5
6. Utah	18	3	10.5
7. Maine	14	8	11
8. Missouri	11	13	12
9. Montana	13	12	12.5
10. Iowa	7	19	13
T11. Virginia	17	13	15
T11. Connecticut	2	28	15
T11. Idaho	20	10	15
14. New Hampshire	21	11	16
15. Michigan	10	24	17

BetVirginia.com – your source for the best Virginia sports betting promos – used a pair of statistics to measure each state’s devotion to the printed word. WordsRated.com analysis gave us the average annual library visits per capita in 2023. Then we found searches for the phrase “Amazon Kindle” at Google Trends over a 12-month span (from August 2022 to August 2023). The average of each state’s standing in those two categories gave us our final rankings.

Virginia Has Long Tradition Of Loving Books

Virginia is tied for No. 11 on our list, garnering the same ranking as Idaho and Connecticut.

One of Virginia’s most famous sons, Thomas Jefferson, gave the young nation of the United States of America one of its greatest book collections. The country’s third President had collected books at a rapid pace throughout his life at his library in Monticello. According to the Library of Congress website, by 1814 Jefferson had the largest personal collection of books in the United States. When the British burned down the original Library of Congress that year, Jefferson offered to sell more than 6,000 volumes to the Library, more than doubling its existing collection. In a subsequent fire at the Library of Congress in 1851, nearly two-thirds of the volumes that had belonged to Jefferson were destroyed.

That library-loving tradition carries on in the commonwealth today. The Fairfax County Public Library system is ranked No. 17 in the country among top 25 public libraries by circulation, according to the American Library Association’s resource guide website. Virginia ranks No. 17 in our list of states by average annual library visits per capita in 2023.

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Virginians Also Enthusiastic About Kindle

The commonwealth rated even higher on Google Trends’ measure of searches for “Amazon Kindle” by coming in at No. 13.

As good as it is to support the library or libraries in our communities, it’s also a measure of Americans’ devotion to books that so many prefer to read them online. Saving physical space (perhaps for more printed books) is one benefit of reading a book online.

If your next topic of reading interest leads you toward Virginia sportsbook apps, you’ll find that information online as well – right here at BetVirginia.com.

Author

Jim Tomlin

@jdtomlin68

Jim Tomlin has nearly 30 years of experience in journalism, having worked at such publications as the Tampa Bay Times, FanRag, Saturdays Down South and Saturday Tradition. He is a contributing writer and editor for BetVirginia.com.